Color in a Color Guard

You may think that this is an oxymoron, of course there is color in a color guard- the team carried flags, hello! However, let’s look a little closer at some specifics.

High schools have a school song, motto, and even school colors. Those colors can really enhance rifles: yellow tape used to make stripes on a black rifle stock or blue on white, etc. there are so many options that an exhibition drill team can use! And then we come to Regulation Drill (RD).

Armed: I am aware of school JROTC budgets and would not demand that a drill team have two complete sets of rifles for competition, although that would be nice: one set with colored tape or stocks for the Exhibition Drill (XD) sequence and one for the RD sequence.

Unarmed: The same would go for an unarmed drill team: standard white gloves, belts, and ascots (if the team wears any of these items) for the RD sequence and then the colorful items for the XD sequence.

Even the gloves with the colorful flash palm are great for XD, but not for RD. Both glove pictures are from www.paradetore.com.

 

I “Strenuously Object”

In the featured image at the top, you can see this JROTC team has rifles with a red stock. I apologize for the poor image quality. Just like “Color Guard Exhibition“, I find this kind of colorful addition to a color guard inappropriate.

The standard colors for rifle stocks are now brown, wood grain, black, and white. From rifle stocks that are a different color from the standard or highlight tape stripes on the stocks, to two-color gloves for the color team members, I strenuously object. However, just like Lt CDR JoAnne Galloway, in the movie, A Few Good Men, my objection probably won’t amount to much.

In any case, I have to get the information out that we all need to follow the standard outlined in the service manuals (military, JROTC, CAP, Sea Cadets) and not the “standard” that has been handed down from from last year’s seniors who were trained by the previous year’s seniors, etc., etc.